By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi The incoming Muhammadu Buhari administration won’t be perfect by any means. It w...
By Farooq
A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
The incoming Muhammadu Buhari administration won’t be
perfect by any means. It will disappoint us in some areas, betray us in others,
even annoy us sometimes, but I am confident that, after all is said and done,
this incoming government will represent a qualitative departure from the
legalized banditry that has passed for governance in Nigeria for so long. There
are at least 6 reasons for my hopes:
1.
Appointment of Ahmed Joda to lead Buhari’s transition committee.
This is a powerful symbolic statement. Malam Ahmed Joda is one Nigerian who
embodies brilliance, probity, decency, and fair-mindedness all at once in equal
measure. I had the privilege to work with him over a decade ago at the
Presidential Research and Communications Unit at the Presidential Villa. I was
one of the journalists recruited to start the unit.
The day I was invited for an interview for the job, I
had written a cover story for the Weekly
Trust that thoroughly embarrassed the Obasanjo administration. Titled
“Obasanjo’s men take over INEC,” the story detailed, with irrefutable
documentary evidence, how almost all the commissioners that the Obasanjo
administration had appointed to INEC were card-carrying members of the PDP. One
of Obasanjo’s really close aides who was a panelist at the interview was
furious with me. He observed that I had written several negative stories about
the Obasanjo administration and wondered why I wanted to work for a government
I disdained.
I have neither the space nor the inclination to
recount the tensile back-and-forth exchange that ensued between the presidential
aide and me. But I basically said my job as a journalist was not to make
governments happy, but to hold them accountable to the people, and that I didn’t
understand the job as I was interviewing for as a job for the person of
Obasanjo. I gave up hope that I would get the job until a frail, light-skinned
old man, that I later learned was called Ahmed Joda, spoke up.
He said the
aggressive aide was being “short-sighted” and recalled a similar experience he
had when he applied for a scholarship to study in the UK in the 1960s or
thereabouts. He had written pungent, hard-hitting articles against the northern
Nigerian government in, I think, the New
Nigerian— or its precursor. The interview panelists, he said, reminded him
of his unfriendly articles and wondered why he wanted the assistance of a
government he was critical of. He recalled that it was the only white man on the
interview panel that chastised the Nigerian panelists as “short-sighted” and
insisted he be given the scholarship.
He retold his story to draw parallels between his
experience and mine and to say that the short-sightedness of overzealous
government officials often robs governments of talents. He told me based on my
CV and my performance at the interview the job was mine if I wanted it. But it
isn’t because he gave me a job in the presidential villa that I respect him a
lot. I got to know him even more when I started work at the Villa. He was the
chairman of the unit and presided over our meetings periodically. I found him
to be incisive, upright, and incorruptible. He resigned from the unit when he
thought it had betrayed the ideals it was set up to achieve.
Anybody who knows just a little bit about Ahmed Joda
knows he disdains corruption and influence peddling and cherishes integrity and
meritocracy. That Buhari chose to make this oasis of honesty in our desert of
knavery the head of his transition committee sets a great tone for his
government.
2.
APC’s swift repudiation of Oba of Lagos’s royal indiscretion.
When Oba of Lagos Rilwan Akiolu said he would drown Igbos in Lagos in the
lagoon if they didn’t vote for the APC governorship candidate in the last
general election, many APC fanatics rose in defense of the Oba’s unwise words.
But APC came out to unequivocally denounce and repudiate it
forthwith. PDP ignored several such incendiary statements by its supporters in
the past. It’s refreshing to have a political party that can condemn what is
wrong even if doing so may put it at odds with its fanatical base.
3.
Buhari’s unaccustomed broadmindedness. I will give just one
example. To the annoyance of APC fanatics, Buhari has been actively promoting the
candidacy of a Jonathan minister by the name of Akinwumi Adesina for the
presidency of the Africa Development Bank (AfDB). Adesina, in addition to being
a Jonathan minister, had maligned
Buhari in a now deleted tweet, which Buhari is aware
of. I can’t find any parallel for this show of maturity and magnanimity in
Nigeria’s recent history.
4.
Swift condemnation of the AIT ban. When it was brought to
his attention that an AIT journalist had been “temporarily banned” from
covering his “personal” activities by a security aide, Buhari swiftly
overturned the ban and cautioned his aides to never again transgress the bounds
of their duties and powers. He did this while APC fanatics were hailing the ban
and defending it with all sorts of contemptible sophistry.
5.
Garba Shehu as Buhari’s media person. People know Malam Garba
Shehu as the suave, urbane, and cerebral former president of the Nigerian Guild
of Editors who has brought panache and sophistication to reputation management
in Nigeria, first as former VP Atiku Abubakar’s Media Adviser and now as APC’s
Presidential Campaign spokesperson. But I know him as much more than that. When
he taught me for two semesters in my final year at Bayero University, Kano
while he was Editor-in-Chief and MD of Triumph Newspapers, he bowled me over
with his brilliance, intellectual depth and, above all, tolerance for dissent.
I almost never agreed with him during classes. I was an aggressive,
dyed-in-the-wool Marxist who disagreed with his “bourgeois” intellection. But
he was incredibly tolerant in ways I had never experienced.
One day, my
classmate, Kabiru Dahiru Marafa, told me to tone down the pungency of my
arguments with Malam Garba. He said the man could decide to “fail" me. So, the
following day, I didn’t talk in class. But Malam Garba was uncomfortable and
wanted to know why I was quiet. He insisted I speak. We were not used to that
sort of discursive accommodation from our full-time lecturers.
I not only got A’s in both semesters he taught me, he
almost gave me a job at the Triumph
after graduation, but I accepted the offer to go to Kaduna to join the emergent
and promising Weekly Trust. When I
aggressively challenged him in class, I didn’t expect him to like me, much less
give me a job. But he described himself as a believer in discursive pluralism.
When I wrote a critical article on Atiku some 9 years ago, he
didn’t attack or chastise me—like most media advisers would. He wrote to
affirm my right to my opinions and to point out what he agreed and disagreed
with in my write-up. I was humbled.
If Buhari chooses Garba as a spokesman or as a
minister of information I am certain we would witness a new era of urbane
information and reputation management. Dissent won’t be dismissed as hostility
that deserves to be crushed with verbal sledgehammers.
6. Buhari’s symbolic but nonetheless significant
gestures like telling family members to steer clear of his government and
telling aides to obey traffic laws inspire me. President Barack Obama is famous
for saying “Africa doesn't need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.” But strong
institutions don’t come out of thin air; they are built by strong men through
the strength of their personal example. I hope Buhari is the strong man who
will build strong institutions in Nigeria with the strength of his character.
Ultimately, the people Buhari will disappoint, I hope,
would be his visceral critics and his hyper-partisan supporters who want him to
be a northern version of Jonathan—petty, vindictive, small-minded, and
intolerant. This fills me with hope.
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"Trolls will be removed and toxic comments will be deleted..." Hahaha, The room should be enough to accommodate all. It is sad that many people who looked up to Buhari for change, ended up being fed hunger, pain and death. What a dissappointment!
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